Preston, whose 1994 book "The Hot Zone" made his name synonymous with troublesome microbes, turns his focus from the Ebola virus to another, potentially even more lethal microbial disaster -- a bioterrorist attack with the smallpox virus.
That was a historic disaster; this industry in the centre of the country's capital is a slower, but far more lethal catastrophe.
In lists of the 40 most expensive and most lethal natural disasters since 1970 recently produced by Swiss Re, a reinsurer, no eruptions feature at all.
Gen. Henry Warner Slocum, a Civil War hero and New York congressman, was the most lethal peacetime maritime disaster in the nation's history.
For even when 20th-century progress is most undeniable, prediction suggests not a continued ascent, but the possibility, perhaps even the imminence, of some catastrophe: another and more lethal world war, an ecological disaster, a technology whose triumphs may make the world uninhabitable by the human species, or whatever current shape the nightmare may take.
But Mr Brown has not presided over any cast-iron disasters or lethal scandals.
Awarded to Patrick Farrell of The Miami Herald for his provocative, impeccably composed images of despair after Hurricane Ike and other lethal storms caused a humanitarian disaster in Haiti.
The fires: There are currently 228 people missing and 42 dead, making the Camp fire in the north even more lethal than the Griffith Park disaster of 1933.
He admitted the focus of his documentary was not the actual disaster or the lethal nature of the nuclear power plants.
Experts have long worried that if a human influenza virus and the H5N1 avian influenza strain now circulating across much of the globe were to combine their genes, the result could be a disaster--a lethal virus that spreads easily among people.
